Orality to the press

In the history of mankind is the central need to communicate and pass on; starting from the gestures and the man's prehistoric cave writings, fino ad arrivare al nostro mondo digitale. Ever since man said his first word today changes have been many.

orality

The oral tradition entrusted to the collective memory of a people was, before the advent of writing, the only possible means to pass and make known the culture and ethical standards.

Just think of the famous Iliad and Odyssey of Homer, that they were passed down orally from generation to generation and were written long after.

The oral culture was for many centuries the primary means of transmission and education even after the advent of the earliest forms of writing, why, before printing, to possess written texts were chosen few.

Writing

In the beginning the writing was born, for economic or political needs, through universal signs representing ideas, objects, actions but not sound, and allowed, for example, Registered trade relations between different populations.

Only later, starting from the ancient Egyptian writing began to be no longer an abstract idea, but the sound is emitted to express that idea.

Around the end of 1500 a.C. The Phoenicians developed a first alphabet consists of 22 consonants, which did not make very fast reading remained closely linked to the context in spite she approached very colloquial usage.

It was the greek alphabet birth, on which Western culture, that opened wide horizons. It is in Greece that the common man literacy opens to a social upheaval: culture and laws become accessible to all and, according to some scholars, it was just that to allow the birth of democracy and greater freedom of the individual.

But orality, as we have already said, It remains an important means of transmission, The proof of this is the Middle Ages.

In the Middle Ages in fact the written culture is in the hands of a few, monasteries become the main center of culture and manuscripts remain in service of the clergy or nobility. Democracy and freedom that had arisen in ancient Greece seem to have disappeared, giving way to a more elitist culture. Ma

The Cultural Revolution will be indelibly marked by the press.

The press and modern writing

With the invention of print Gutenberg starts the great cultural revolution that marks the beginning of the modern age.

It was not an immediate process, it took 200 years because the changes introduced by the press in society and in knowledge were definitely systematized.

Thanks to the arrival of the card to replace the parchment the printing process becomes less expensive and makes it easier to spread the book written.

The cultural center will move from the monasteries to the printers' shops where the written word to life. It is thanks to the press that officially spreads vulgar (precursor of our Italian) and it is abandoned Latin, making it the easiest and community learning process.

So opens the era of the printed book available to all, the era of the great thinkers, the job at hand for writing and culture.

Present Day